Test Your IT Monitoring Tools Regularly

Most IT Departments have active monitoring tools to make sure you are notified in the event that something goes wrong, right, or is starting to look sketchy (much like a bad NHL trade). These systems are put in place with the mindset of a set it and forget it mentality because hey, its supposed to alert us right? Well if you haven't heard it before I am saying it now. No. Is that a complete sentence? Probably not, but it gets my point across. Monitoring systems and devices are only as good as their trustworthiness and much like your gradual trusting of friendships must grow by testing the tools on a regular basis.

I will use our power monitoring/temperature monitoring device in our server closet as an example. In the event of a power failure, or A/C unit failure one of two things will happen. In the first scenario, the unit alerts us by calling my cell phone to notify me that power has been lost and the unit is running on backup power (this unit is a cellular one). In scenario two the device calls my cell and alerts me to a high temperature reading, possibly caused by a malfunction in the A/C unit. If I never test the unit by pulling the power plug then I have no faith the unit will successfully call me in the event of a power outage, and if its not regularly tested then I have no faith the battery is still holding a charge inside the unit and will stay alive long enough to make the call needed through our vendor.

Testing these units regularly should be on your IT calendar and should be as often as you or a colleague can test it. (For us, quarterly should be our testing cycle).

Having faith in these systems to work correctly when needed can help an Administrator sleep at night knowing a trustful partner is always watching and thankfully never needs sleep.

Intel WiDi Stops Lync 2013 from Recognizing Audio Devices

We have used Lync 2013 for a while the company I work for and overall with little issues (amazingly). However the other day I attempted to join a conference call and utilize my built in webcam/mic but found that Lync couldn't see any audio device at all. This was strange considering it was showing up in the computer management console, and in recording devices. I could even use the microphone and record with windows built in recorder so that was odd too.

I attempted first a repair of Lync 2013, but no dice. Then I re-installed my Dell audio drivers, but no luck there either. A bit of Google searching lead me to just a few articles stating that Intel's WiDi application caused some problems with audio devices. Sure enough one of the posts in particular was on Lync specifically so I decided to give it a shot and uninstall. After a quick reboot Lync was perfect again and I was without one more useless program (to me at least). Dell (from whom we buy our laptops) has components in most of their laptops which include this application, however I have never used it. Uninstalling it did not show any unknown devices in computer management or prompt for driver installation every time the machine booted up so I'll be making sure to uninstall this from all new deployments of laptops within the company.

I never could figure out the "why"behind the failure for the applications to not play nice, but what's fixed is fixed.

An Outlook Signature Deployment and How it Changed My Way of Thinking

Over the course of the past few years our company has wanted to get everyone on a standardized signature to include company information, links and a professional picture of the employee to help give us a personal feel to clients. The idea was great, however deploying signatures to 40 or so employees seemed daunting at the time I had come on board, as well as making the signature its self which was based loosely on the original we had.

I have learned a lot in those past few years about the company, people, technology, and design hoping to make the process easier as some point.

It never happened however. Instead I struggled with the project, with issues surrounding the signature design and even worse compatibility among other programs.

The project changed, died off, came back and changed again. I was fed up, I was tired and most of all I was uninterested. I couldn't make parts of it work well. Images were blown up, Gmail just saw code and I was exhausted with the project altogether.

At the end of 2013 my supervisor had brought the project back up and decided on deploying it before our annual company meeting. I groaned but went along. He suggested we use a third party this time due to my busy schedule, hoping to make things smoother and finish quicker. I'll be the first to admit that utilizing an outside vendor to do "my" job seemed against my own nature, and I am 100% sure I resisted more than I should have. It took a bit for me to warm up to the idea but got them going on it anyway.

The vendor came in, and I showed him what we had and our issues with my ideas and let him get to work. He came back with a signature that looked similar but different and I was actually very pleased on how it turned out. I got my supervisor involved and he stated that he liked it more as well. After some refinements the vendor left to work on it more at a later time and to make it auto populate from excel based data so I could create them easily. Testing of the signature came and went and this time, no garbled code in Gmail, and nothing weird in different versions of Outlook. It became a big win to get even this far and my interested increased ever so slightly back into the project.

I ended up deploying the signatures myself (though it may have worked with a vendor) citing my users busy schedules and the cost of the vendor on site. We've achieved 100% deployment for the users who were with us and had professional photos taken, and all the while I was able to turn my attention to other projects while still having more than plenty to do. In the end my offload of this project to a vendor saved me a lot of time, and got the "leech" of a project out of my head while still being able to show progress week by week on it. Looking back it seemed silly to sit on my mess and not clean it up while all the while I could have utilized someone else to clean up the mess and come back with a steak dinner so to speak. Sitting on messes doesn't help anyone in the long run, the meal never gets made and you smell like rotten eggs. Sometimes, you just need to delegate.

Unable to install Symantec 12.1.4xxx on Windows 8.1 VM

I had a bit of trouble today trying to install Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.4xxx on a Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit virtual machine. The installer would fail and give cryptic advice through the windows event viewer console which was almost worthless. I followed the random number given to me (1603) to a few articles on Symantec's website but all referenced an issue that was supposed to have been fixed in 12.1.3xxx.

Sad to say I must have found a loophole.

I did check into a few things but was not able to find a work around. (Disabled Windows Defender, looked for a bad KB update)

I opened a case with Symantec and will report back my findings.

EDIT 2/4/14:

We were able to resolve this after running the clean wipe utility from Symantec. After that the installation completed successfully!

New Bumper Sticker Idea

While laying in bed reading the doom and gloom of April's XP-mageddom I wanted to type out a warning to friends and family about running the ancient OS.

I came up with a saying that even impressed me after saying it

"For the love of IT, dump XP"

Didn't even realize is kinda rhymes. Now to just find some place to make the bumper sticker I'll never use.  I've got a dislike of those things unless they are in your cubicle somewhere.